Peptidic analogs of the juvenile hormone (JH) selectively interfere with development of linden bugs. Newly derived peptidic juvenoids bind and activate the JH receptor of the linden bug at picomolar doses, thus by far surpassing potency of the native linden bug hormone.
The work examines the parallel between the reward system in bees as a social insect and human society.
Some insects survive winter with their body water frozen. In preparation for overwintering, they accumulate mixtures of different small molecules – most often sugars, amino acids and their derivatives, and also proteins, in their hemolymph. Based on in vitro assays and theory, insect physiologists hypothesized that these molecules protect insect enzymes and biological membranes against loss of...
Mayflies are one of the oldest pterygote insects, with relatively rare remnants in sedimentary rocks and fossil resins. The team of scientists from the Czech Republic, Spain, Poland and Germany have presented the first description of the fossil mayfly species using Micro-CT.
A recent study in the prestigious American journal PNAS by Schultheiss and colleagues has refined estimates of how many ants live in the world and how much they weigh. It estimated that they are approximately 2.5 million worker ants for every human, and all of the ants in the world weigh as much as a fifth of the human population on Earth. The study was followed up by a comment in the same...
The loss of biodiversity and species extinction are well-known phenomena of today. However, biodiversity is not only disappearing today but also emerging. This process was demonstrated by scientists from the Biology Centre and their colleagues from Masaryk University in Brno and the University of Prešov in Slovakia. They found out how the evolution of new species is currently in process in the...
On 14 September 2022, the President of the Czech Academy of Sciences, prof. RNDr. Eva Zažímalová, CSc. awarded the G. J. Mendel Medal of Honour for Merit in the Biological Sciences to our colleague František Marec. Congratulations on receiving this important award!
Using a combination of laboratory experiments and dynamic simulations, we quantified the effects of phenological shifts on Drosophila–parasitoid interactions under the climatic change.
Our PhD student Samuel Dijoux won the 4th International SIL Student Competition for the best paper from a PhD a MSc thesis (https://limnology.org/students/sil-student-competition/sil-student-competition-winners/) with his 2021 Ecology Letters entry on multi-channel food webs. Samuel also shared the 3rd place in the Vojtěch Jarošík Award for 2021...
Mayflies constitute a very ancient group of insects; fossils of their relatives can be hundreds of millions years old. Scientists from Biology Centre and Natural History Museum in Stuttgart studied unique fossils of mayfly nymphs from the Triassic (early Mesozoic).